Odd Man Out

Name: Odd Man Out
Director: Carol Reed
Released: 1947

Synopsis

Belfast police conduct a door-to-door manhunt for an IRA gunman wounded in a daring robbery.

100
BBC
Reed's take on the material is innovative, letting realism blur into an anaemic, soul-searching delirium.
100
Empire
Suspense gives way to metaphor in a stark thriller that hints at the work to come from master Carol Reed.
100
Entertainment Weekly
Mason gives a grand performance, his voice racked with desperation and pain yet sonorous.
90
The Dissolve
Though he has little coherent dialogue after a certain point, Mason is ideal as the embodiment of unsteadiness, physical and moral.
88
Chicago Reader
This may be Reed’s most pretentious film, but it also happens to be one of his very best, beautifully capturing the poetry of a city at night (with black-and-white cinematography by Robert Krasker that’s within hailing distance of Gregg Toland and Stanley Cortez’s work with Orson Welles).
88
Slant Magazine
Odd Man Out is indeed a character study wrapped in the guise of a sociopolitical thriller, and a work which accordingly plays better when accentuating the moral and personal complexities of the former through the aesthetic prism of the latter, shedding the weight of topical investment even as the shadows of its influence hang literally and figuratively on the film’s dramatic landscape.
80
The New York Times
A most intriguing film.
80
Time
Even in its failures, Odd Man Out is admirable. It is a reckless, head-on attempt at greatness, and the attempt frequently succeeds.